Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  Earthmen had spread out among the stars of a little section of an arm of the galactic spiral. Now they reeled back under the emotionless assault of the machines; planets and whole systems were depopulated.

  Men fought back when they could. The passenger ship, intercepted far from help, had had no chance; but three or four warships could circle a berserker machine like wolves around a bear, could match missiles and computer speeds with it for long minutes, and—sometimes—could win. For the enemy was old, and damaged by warfare through unknown centuries and systems. Possibly many of them had been destroyed before their swarm descended upon Earthmen. The machines surviving had learned, as machines can learn, to avoid tactical error, and to never forgive the mistakes of an opponent. Their basic built-in order was the destruction of all life encountered. But each machine’s strategic schemes were unpredictable, being controlled by the random atomic disintegrations of some longlived radioactive isotope, buried in the center of the mechanism.

  Hemphill’s mind hung over the brink of death, as his fingers held the plunger of his bomb. The nightcolored enemy was death in his mind; old as a meteorite, a hundred miles or more around its bulging middle. The black scarred surface of it hurtled closer in the unreal starlight, becoming a planet toward which the boat fell.

  Hemphill still clung to the boat when it was pulled into an opening that could have accommodated many ships. The size and power of the berserker were all around the man, enough to overwhelm hate and courage alike.

  His little bomb was a pointless joke. When the boat touched at a dark internal dock, Hemphill leaped into it and scrambled to find a hiding place.

  As he cowered on a shadowed ledge of metal, his hand wanted to fire the bomb, simply to bring death and escape. He forced his hand to be still. He forced himself to watch while the two human prisoners were sucked from the boat through a pulsing transparent tube that passed through a bulkhead. Not knowing what he meant to accomplish, he pushed himself in the direction of the tube. He glided through the dark enormous cavern almost weightlessly; the berserker’s mass was enough to give it a small natural gravity of its own.

  Within ten minutes he came upon an unmistakable airlock. It seemed to have been cut with a surrounding section of hull from some Earth warship, and set into the bulkhead.

  Inside an airlock would be as good a place for a bomb as he was likely to find. He got the outer door open and went in, apparently without triggering any alarms. If he destroyed himself here, he would deprive the berserker of—what? Why should it need an airlock at all?

  Not for prisoners, thought Hemphill, if it sucks them in through a tube. Hardly an entrance built for enemies. He tested the air in the lock, and opened his helmet. For airbreathing friends, the size of men? That was a contradiction. Everything that lived and breathed must be a berserker’s enemy—except, of course, the unknown beings who had sometime built it, and loosed it to do what damage it might.

  It was thought they were extinct, or unreachably distant in space and time. No defeated and boarded berserker had been found to carry a crew, or to have a place or purpose for a living crew.

  The inner door of the lock opened and artificial gravity came on. Hemphill walked into a narrow and badly lighted passage, his fingers ready on the plunger.

  “Go in, Goodlife,” said the machine. “Look closely at each of them.”

  Goodlife made an uncertain sound in his throat, like a servomotor starting and stopping. He was gripped by a feeling resembling hunger, or the fear of punishment—because he was going to see life forms directly now, not as old images on a stage. Knowing the reason for the unpleasant feeling did not help. He stood hesitating outside the door of the room where the badlife was being kept. He had put on his suit again, as the machine had ordered. The suit would protect him if the badlife tried to damage him.

  “Go in,” the machine repeated.

  “Maybe I’d better not,” Goodlife said in misery, remembering to speak well and clearly. Punishment was always less likely when he did.

  “Punish, punish,” said the voice.

  When it said the word twice, punishment was very near. As if already feeling in his bones the wrenching pain-that-left-no-damage, he opened the door quickly and stepped in.

  He lay on the floor, bloody and damaged, in strange ragged suiting. And at the same time, he was still in the doorway. His own shape was on the floor, the same human form he knew, but now seen entirely from outside. More than an image, far more, it was himself now bi-located. There, here, himself, not himself—Goodlife fell back against the door. He raised his arm and tried to bite it, forgetting his suit. He pounded his suited arms violently together, until there was bruised pain enough to nail him to himself where he stood.

  Slowly, the terror subsided. Gradually his intellect could explain it and master it. This is me, here, here in the doorway. That, there, on the floor—that is another life. Another body, corroded like me with vitality. One far worse than I. That one on the floor is badlife.

  Maria Juarez had prayed continuously for a long time, her eyes closed. Cold impersonal grippers had moved her this way and that. Her weight had come back, and there was air to breathe when her helmet and her suit had been carefully removed. She opened her eyes and struggled when the grippers began to remove her inner coverall; she saw that she was in a lowceilinged room, surrounded by mansized machines of various shapes. When she struggled they paused briefly; then gave up undressing her, chained her to the wall by one ankle, and glided away. The dying mate had been dropped at the other end of the room, as if not worth the trouble of further handling.

  The man with cold dead eyes, Hemphill, had tried to make a bomb, and failed. Now there would probably be no quick end to life—

  When she heard the door operates she opened her eyes again, to watch without comprehension while the bearded young man in the ancient spacesuit went through senseless contortions in the doorway, and finally came forward to stand staring down at the dying man on the floor. The visitor’s fingers moved with speed and precision when he raised his hands to the fasteners of his helmet; but the helmet’s removal revealed ragged hair and beard framing an idiot’s slack face.

  He set the helmet down, then scratched and rubbed his hairy head, never taking his eyes from the man on the floor. He had not yet looked once at Maria, and she could look nowhere but at him. She had never seen a face so blank on a living person. This was what happened to a berserker’s prisoner!

  And yet—and yet Maria had seen the brainwashed, ex-criminals on her own planet. She felt this man was something more—or something less.

  The bearded man knelt beside the mate, with an air of hesitation, and reached out to touch him. The dying man stirred feebly, and looked up without comprehension. The floor under him was wet with blood.

  The stranger took the mate’s limp arm and bent it back and forth, as if interested in the articulation of the human elbow. The mate groaned and struggled feebly. The stranger suddenly shot out his metal-gauntleted hands and seized the dying man by the throat.

  Maria could not move or turn her eyes away, though the whole room seemed to spin slowly, then faster and faster, around the focus of those armored hands.

  The bearded man released his grip and stood erect, still watching the body at his feet.

  “Turned off,” he said distinctly.

  Perhaps she moved. For whatever reason, the bearded man raised his sleep-walker’s face to look at her. He did not meet her eyes, or avoid them. His eye movements were quick and alert, but the muscles of his face just hung there under the skin. He came toward her.

  Why, he’s young, she thought. Hardly more than a boy. She backed against the wall and waited, standing. Women were not brought up to faint on her planet. Somehow, the closer he came, the less she feared him. But if he had smiled once she would have screamed, on and on.

  He stood before her, and reached out one hand to touch her face, her hair, her body. She stood still; she felt no lust in him, no meanness and no kind
ness. It was as if he radiated an emptiness.

  “Not images,” said the young man as if to himself. Then another word, sounding like: “Badlife.”

  Almost Maria dared to speak to him. The strangled man lay on the deck a few yards away.

  The young man turned and shuffled deliberately away. She had never seen anyone who walked just like him. He picked up his helmet and went out the door without looking back.

  A pipe streamed water into one corner of her little space, where it gurgled away through a hole in the floor. The gravity seemed to be set at about Earth level. Maria sat leaning against the wall, praying and listening to her heart pound. It almost stopped when the door opened again; only a machine entered, to bring her a large cake of pink and green stuff that seemed to be food. The machine walked around the dead man on its way out.

  She had eaten a little of the cake when the door opened again, very slightly at first, then enough for a man to step quickly in. It was Hemphill, the cold-eyed one from the ship, leaning a bit to one side as if dragged down by the weight of the little bomb he still carried under his arm. After a quick look around he shut the door behind him and crossed the room to her, hardly glancing down as he stepped over the body of the mate.

  “How many of them are there?” Hemphill whispered, bending over her. She had remained seated on the floor, too surprised to move or speak.

  “Who?” she finally managed.

  He jerked his head impatiently. “Them. The ones who live here inside it, and serve it. I saw one of them coming out of the room, when I was out in the passage. It’s fixed up a lot of breathing space for them.”

  He showed Maria how the bomb could be made to explode, and gave it to her to hold, while he began to burn through her chain with the laser pistol. They exchanged information on what had happened. She did not think she would ever be able to pull the plunger and kill herself, but she did not tell that to Hemphill.

  III

  Just as they stepped out of the prison room. Hemphill had a bad moment when three machines rolled toward them from around a corner. But the things ignored the two frozen humans and rolled silently past them, going on out of sight.

  He turned to Maria with an exultant whisper: “The damned thing is three-quarters blind, here inside its own skin!”

  She only waited, watching him with frightened eyes.

  With the beginning of hope, a vague plan was forming in his mind. He led her on, saying: “Now we’ll see about that man. Or men.” Was it too good to be true, that there was only one of them?

  The corridors were badly lit, with uneven jogs and steps in them. Carelessly built concessions to life, he thought. He moved in the direction he had seen the man take.

  After a few minutes of cautious advance, Hemphill heard the shuffling footsteps of one person ahead, coming nearer. He handed the bomb to Maria again, and pressed her behind him. They waited in a dark niche.

  The footsteps approached with careless speed, a vague shadow bobbing ahead of them. The shaggy head swung so abruptly into view that Hemphill’s metal-fisted swing was almost too late. The blow only grazed the back of the skull; the man yelped and staggered off balance and fell down. He was wearing an old-model spacesuit, with no helmet.

  Hemphill crouched over him, shoving the laser pistol almost into his face. “Make a sound and I’ll kill you. Where are the others?”

  The face looking up at Hemphill was stunned—worse than stunned It seemed more dead than alive, though the eyes moved alertly enough from Hemphill to Maria and back, disregarding the gun.

  “He’s the same one,” Maria whispered.

  “Where are your friends?” Hemphill asked.

  The man felt the back of his head, where he had been hit. “Damage,” he said tonelessly, as if to himself. Then he reached up for the pistol, so calmly and steadily that he was nearly able to touch it.

  Hemphill jumped back a step, and barely kept himself from firing. “Sit still or I’ll kill you! Now tell me who you are, and how many others are here.”

  The man’s putty face showed nothing. He said: “Your speech is steady in tone from word to word, not like that of the machine. You hold a killing tool there. Give it to me, and I will destroy you and—that one.”

  It seemed this man was only a brainwashed ruin, instead of an unspeakable traitor. Now what use could be made of him? Hemphill moved back another step, slowly lowering the pistol.

  Maria spoke to their prisoner.

  “Where are you from? What planet?

  A blank stare.

  She repeated the question in a couple of other languages, with no better result, then returned to the universal Loglan of Earth’s spacemen and colonists.

  “Your home. Where were you born?”

  “From the birth tank.” Sometimes the tones of the man’s voice shifted like the berserker’s, as if he was a fearful comedian mocking it.

  Hemphill gave an unstable laugh. “From a birth tank, of course. What else? Where are the others?”

  “I do not understand.”

  Hemphill sighed. “All right. Where’s this birth tank?”

  The place looked like the storeroom of a biology lab, badly lighted, with equipment piled and crowded, laced with pipes and conduits. But perhaps no living technician had ever worked here.

  “You were born here?” Hemphill demanded.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s crazy.”

  “No, wait.” Maria’s voice sank to an even lower whisper, as if she was frightened anew. She took the hand of the slack-faced man, and he bent his head to stare at their touching hands.

  “Do you have a name?” she asked, as if of a lost child.

  “I am Goodlife.”

  “I think it’s hopeless,” put in Hemphill.

  The girl ignored him. “Goodlife? My name is Maria. And this is Hemphill.”

  No reaction.

  “Who were your parents? Father? Mother?

  “They were goodlife too. They helped the machine. There was a battle, and badlife killed them. But they had given cells of their bodies to the machine, and from them it made me. Now I am the only goodlife.”

  “Great God,” whispered Hemphill.

  Silent, awed attention seemed to move Goodlife when threats and pleas had not. His face moved in awkward grimaces; then he turned to stare into a corner. For almost the first time, he volunteered a communication: “I know they were like you. A man and a woman.”

  Hemphill wanted to sweep every cubic foot of the miles of mechanism with his hatred; he looked around.

  “The damned things,” he said, his voice cracking like the berserker’s own. “What they’ve done to me. To you. To everyone.”

  Plans seemed to come when the strain of hating was greatest. He moved quickly to put a hand on Goodlife’s shoulder. “Listen to me. Do you know what a radioactive isotope is?”

  “Yes.”

  “There will be a place, somewhere, where the—the machine decides what it will do next—what strategy to follow. A place holding a block of some isotope with a long half-life. Probably near the center of the machine. Do you know of such a place?”

  “Yes, I know where the strategic housing is.”

  “Strategic housing.” Hope mounted to a strong new level. “Is there a way for us to reach it?”

  “You are badlife!” He knocked Hemphill’s hand away, awkwardly. “You want to damage the machine, and you have damaged me. You are to be destroyed.”

  Maria took over, trying to soothe. “Goodlife—we are not bad, this man and I. Those who built this machine are the badlife. Someone built it, you know, some living people built it, long ago. They were the real badlife.”

  “Badlife.” He might be agreeing with Maria, or accusing her.

  “Don’t you want to live, Goodlife? Hemphill and I want to live. We want to help you, because you’re alive, like us. Won’t you help us now?”

  Goodlife was silent for a few moments. Then he turned back to face them and said: “All life thinks it is
, but it is not. There are only particles, energy and space, and the laws of the machines.”

  Maria kept at him. “Goodlife, listen to me. A wise man once said: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ ”

  “A wise man?” ne questioned, in his cracking voice. Then he sat down on the deck, hugging his knees and rocking back and forth. He might be thinking.

  Drawing Maria aside, Hemphill said: “You know, we have a faint hope now. There’s plenty of air in here, there’s water and food. There are warships following this thing, there must be. If we can find a way to disable it, we can wait and maybe be picked up in a month or two.”

  She watched him silently for a moment. “Hemphill—what have these machines done to you?”

  “My wife—my children.” He thought his voice sounded almost indifferent. “They were on Pascalo, three years ago; there was nothing left. This machine, or one like it.” She took his hand, as she had taken Goodlife’s. They both looked down at the joined fingers, then raised their eyes, smiling briefly together at the similarity of action.

  “Where’s the bomb?” Hemphill thought aloud suddenly, spinning around.

  It lay in a dim corner. He grabbed it up again, and strode over to where Goodlife sat and rocked.

  “Well, are you with us? Us, or the ones who built the machine?” Goodlife stood up, and looked closely at Hemphill. “They were inspired by the laws of physics, which controlled their brains, to build the machine. Now the machine has preserved them as images. It has preserved my father and mother, and it will preserve me.”

  “What images do you mean? Where are they?”

  “The images in the theater.”

  The right course seemed to be to accustom him to co-operation, win his confidence, learn about him and the machine. Then, to the strategic housing.

  “Will you guide us to the theater, Goodlife?”

  It was by far the largest airfilled room they had yet found, with a hundred seats of a shape usable by Earthmen, though Hemphill guessed it had been built for someone else. The theater was elaborately furnished and well lighted. When the door closed behind them, the ranked images of intelligent creatures brightened into life upon the stage.